Just Cigarette Smoke
by Robin Siskin
Summary: But then again, maybe it was just cigarette smoke. [AUish if you squint, Havoccentric, oneshot, kind of drabble, no pairings unless you can spot sexual tension in everything]


**A/N** – Wow. A shorty this time. First FMA fic. Had a bit of trouble, partly because I haven't read all the manga yet (I'm up to chapter 22!), and partly because Havoc is kind of hard to get. All we get is some vaguely expressed emotions and some ongoing gags about the smexy little hotcake known as Roy Mustang taking all his girlfriends. So it might be OOC. But you should be gentle, because as far as I know, there's some major Jeany-poo development coming up that I'm unaware of. If that happens, I'm deeply sorry for screwing up your character, Arakawa-sensei. THANKEE.

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Maybe one of the reasons that he could never keep his girlfriends very long was because of his smoking. He hadn't had one of them yet give him a reason for leaving, but a great number of them had, laughing nervously, said that their eyes were starting to sting from all the smoke in the air when he lit one up on a date.

Well, _his _eyes stung when they quit answering their phones and coming to meet him. It made him want a cigarette just thinking about it.

He didn't even have to take a drag of a cigarette any more for it to comfort him. Just the feeling of it hanging in his mouth was enough to chase away those depressing thoughts. Just having the smoke floating up into his eyes was enough to allow him to convince himself that the obnoxious sting was an effect of the cigarette smoke and not of a childish urge to cry. Even the Elric brothers, younger than anybody else in the military, didn't break down over things as common and minor as being stood up on a date. But then again, neither did he; it was the fact that he was stood up time and time again that made his eyes sting like that. Or maybe it was just cigarette smoke.

The others would laugh and joke (and sometimes be slightly disturbed) about his absolute lack of luck with women; hell, he would laugh and joke about it. He didn't have to go around as a dark and broken soul, hiding all his inner turmoil, because that wasn't how he felt. He _wasn't_ being torn up inside. He _didn't _feel like his soul was being ripped into a million tiny pieces. All that was there was the annoying sting in his eyes and prickle in his nose that could have been just a reaction to cigarette smoke and could have been childish sensitivity, and the feelings of uselessness that followed.

He hated feeling like he was useless, be it to his comrades or when it came to women, and it seemed like whenever he didn't light up, he _was_ useless. Because when he had a cigarette in his mouth he had an easy excuse for everything. The women left him because they couldn't stand his smoking habits, and his eyes had a bad tendency to water because they were sensitive to smoke. If that cigarette was absent, there was nothing to say without admitting to minor insecurities that he wasn't sure he wanted to even admit to himself. Minor insecurities that he wasn't even sure _existed_. There was no need to go pondering about admitting their existence to others or to himself when he'd never really thought about if they were really there. After all, it was just stinging eyes and a prickly nose and a nasty tightening sensation in the back of his throat that could very well have been an effect of getting a bad filter on a batch of cigarettes. It _could _have been sparked by some (minor, of course) insecurity. It was possible. He wasn't going to outright _lie _to himself. That was the worst possible thing to do when pondering about the inner workings of one's own mind, and one of the easiest things today. So he really should take into consideration that possibility. He _could _be harboring deep-seated insecurities about feeling useless, even though he was pretty sure he just preferred to feel useful, like most other normal people in the world, and most abnormal people (Maes Hughes wasn't exactly normal, and he had practically lived to keep his family happy and push the Colonel up in rank). It could be possible.

But then again, maybe it was just cigarette smoke.


End file.
